Motivating students of diverse sociocultural backgrounds to achieveLa motivación al logro de estudiantes de ambientes socioculturales diversosLa motivation à l'accomplissement d'étudiants ayant un passé socioculturel différent

This paper addresses a problem of major importance to educators: the motivation of students of differing sociocultural backgrounds. While the analysis builds on the earlier work of McClelland, the focus is by no means confined to that perspective. Indeed, achievement motivation is essentially redefined and a more comprehensive analysis is attempted in which personality, situation, and situation x personality factors are all concerned. The central thrust of the article, of course, is on what one can change about personality and situations to increase the achievement motivation of students. In this regard, various intervention studies are reviewed and evaluated, and new possibilities are suggested. There is a decided emphasis on the efficiency, practicality, and general appropriateness of concentrating on situations (or contextual) change rather than attempting to change enduring personality patterns.     

Behaviours of Concern to Teachers in the Early Years of School

Teachers of students aged from five to eight years at 21 primary schools in western Sydney were surveyed about child behaviour that concerned them and their needs for support in dealing with such behaviour. Although most teachers were confident of their ability to manage classroom behaviour, teachers reported a need for support in dealing with distractibility and concern about aggressive behaviours. Less confident teachers expressed higher levels of concern about aggression, distractibility, and disobedience and wanted more support for dealing with distractibility and disobedience. No relationships were found between teacher concerns or support needs and teacher experience, class level or size, Local Government Area income grouping, and whether or not the school received additional funding for disadvantaged schools.     

Stokingham Sixth Form College: Institutional culture and dispositions to learning

Learning is high on the political agenda for post-compulsory education and training in England. Official discourses about learning assume a predominantly individualist stance, despite the development of theoretical models that stress the contextual and situated nature of learning. In a study following 50 young people through further education over 4 years, it became apparent that the institutional culture of the colleges had a significant impact upon students' dispositions towards their learning. In this paper, we explore the nature and significance of this impact in a case-study sixth form college: an under-researched sector of educational provision. This is followed by a brief discussion of the implications of our analysis for issues of access, widening participation and inequality in relation to current proposals to reform age 16-19 educational provision in England. We conclude by identifying some of the questions about the fine-grained nature of that college culture that our data does not permit us to address directly.     

Re‐engineering conventional university education: Implications for students’ learning styles

There is no doubt that education is being fundamentally transformed and affected by information and communication technologies (ICT). The demand for online courses in higher education is growing. Education is also affected by the new approaches towards learning and instruction that have emerged during recent decades: student centred learning, distributed learning, and collaborative learning. These new instructional approaches reflect the adoption of constructivist approaches to learning. National and international studies support this approach, but also point to a number of problems, such as the lack of clear policies and implementation strategies. The adoption of new learning approaches has resulted in the re‐engineering of courses, curricula and in certain cases complete universities. Examples of the latter can be found at the Jones International University (www.jiu.edu) that started in May 1999 as a completely new and virtual university, and the Dutch Open University that transformed its educational model towards a competency‐based educational model implemented in a digital university setting (www.ou.nl). The transition from a traditional approach is not an easy process. The implementation of the new ideas can be hampered by a large number of variables and processes at micro‐ and mesolevels. The study, described in this article analyses such difficulties when implementing a specific re‐engineering of a course. The difficulties are described and analysed in terms of the learning styles of students. The major focus of the study is on incongruencies between the innovative course re‐design and learning styles issues. The authors expect that the results of the study will fuel the discussion about the necessity to consider innovation at the meso‐level (curriculum level) instead of solely at course level.     

Standards for the Award of Qualified Teacher Status: Reflections on assessment implications

The paper raises some concerns about the assessment procedures implicit in the new Standards for the award of Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) issued by the Teacher Training Agency (TTA) and, as a consequence, a question mark is raised over the process and purpose of their introduction to initial teacher education (ITE) in England and Wales. What appears to be a technocratic approach to the assessment of teacher trainees in reality straddles a hybrid position in terms of the assessment model on which it is based. Little regard has been given, in the public domain at least, either to the rationale behind the introduction of the Standards or to the process of implementation. Having taken the ITE world more by surprise than storm this paper reflects upon the Standards in the context of assessment. It builds on previous pleas for a relevant assessment paradigm for workplace assessment, that of the judgemental model (Hager & Butler, 1996; Martin, 1997).     

A Hierarchical Document Retrieval Language

The focus of this work is on the development of a document retrieval language which attempts to enable users to better represent their requirements with respect to retrieved documents. We describe a framework for evaluating documents which allows, in the spirit of computing with words, a linguistic specification of the interrelationship between the desired attributes. This framework, which makes considerable use of the Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) operator, also supports a hierarchical structure which allows for an increased expressiveness of queries.     

New Approaches to Spoken Document Retrieval

This paper presents four novel techniques for open-vocabulary spoken document retrieval: a method to detect slots that possibly contain a query feature; a method to estimate occurrence probabilities; a technique that we call collection-wide probability re-estimation and a weighting scheme which takes advantage of the fact that long query features are detected more reliably. These four techniques have been evaluated using the TREC-6 spoken document retrieval test collection to determine the improvements in retrieval effectiveness with respect to a baseline retrieval method. Results show that the retrieval effectiveness can be improved considerably despite the large number of speech recognition errors.